After It All
by LianatheWingedDrummer16
Summary: Tau Volantis was just the beginning. With the Brethren Moons awake and the risks greater than ever, Isaac, Ellie, and Carver must find a way to stop the Necromorphs before humanity truly comes to its end. *Post-Awakened*
1. Chapter 1: The End of the World

**Holy shit, it's been a while. To those of you who read the update, I've decided to give this whole thing a fresh start - so here we go!**

It couldn't end this way.

All that they'd worked for, everything they'd sacrificed - Danik had torn that to bits as soon as he unleashed the Moon.

It towered over them, hungry, eager to wreak its havoc upon the planet and the small group of people still left standing. The sky around it was colored a murky, bloody orange, and the disgusting tentacles protruding from its center reached for them as though preparing to tear open their bodies.

She ducked as the roof far above their heads shattered into even more fragments, her body telling her to flee even though she knew it was useless. There was no escape from a creature that big. She could probably run across the universe and it would still find her somehow.

Danik's rambling about the beginning of Convergence was cut off by a shard of stone piercing him nearly in half, and it was that of all things that made her realize they were in imminent danger. Time sped up until it became almost too fast. Her adrenaline coursed through her veins and she instinctively reached for Isaac.

He wasn't by her side. Where was he?

She spun, looking for him. The ground shifted violently under her feet and she nearly crashed into him, gripping his arms hard as she tried to regain her footing. She looked into his eyes, desperation written all across her face.

But in his gentle blue eyes there was something quite incongruous to the situation: acceptance.

_What...?_

"Ellie," Isaac said, holding tight, "when I finish this, it's all going down. Everything. You have to go."

She shook her head, anguished at the realization that he intended to stay. Why did he always have to play the goddamn hero?

Carver roughly broke in, "No! You two get outta here. Get back to Earth Space, tell them what we found. I'm staying - it's all I've got left."

"You can't stop it, Carver. Not without me. I'm the Marker killer, remember?"

So that was it, then. He felt the need to save everyone from this horror, to stop it from taking any more lives.

Ellie tried, "Isaac-"

"I turned my back on the world because I was afraid of what needed to be done," he explained. As if finally reaching some sort of peace with himself, he added, "Ellie, I'm not afraid anymore."

The ground again shook violently, but Ellie fought for her death grip on Isaac until she could stand properly, her eyes locked on his face. She watched in disbelief as he pressed a picture of himself, the one she'd torn in a fit of anger, into her hand, and her heart broke.

"There's a shuttle over there," he said, his voice barely reaching her ears through her shocked daze. "I want you to take it and head for home."

She was torn between doing the right thing and leaving them. Someone had to warn Earth of the new threat, the fact that their problems had reached the planet-sized scale, but this had been her mission, the goal she'd given up so much for. She couldn't leave it unfinished.

She couldn't leave Isaac and Carver to die, either.

But she had to.

She threw herself at him, unable to bear the prospect of him being gone from her life permanently, and kissed him full on the mouth like her life depended on it. The contact lasted three, four seconds - and then they separated. She gazed at him desperately, trying to memorize every last detail of the man she loved.

He pushed her to the shuttle, calling, "Don't come back for me. We both know I'm not going home!"

_Why?_

Her heart was screaming at her to stay, but she forced herself to move, away to the shuttle, climbing inside and buckling in as her throat clogged with tears impossible to shed.

She finally stopped the shuttle a safe distance away from the Moon, watching as the gigantic Necromorph crashed into the planet.

There was no way either of them could have survived, but she had to know. For sure.

Quietly, she pushed the comms button. "Isaac?" she whispered. "Isaac, are you there?"

There was nothing but despairing silence. Her head bowed under the weight of her grief. "Carver? Isaac? You're gone, aren't you?"

The words were painful to get out. Each syllable was like admitting defeat, and her own failure to realize what she had risked and lost pursuing the mission. Why hadn't she seen it before?

She rested her chin in her hand, trying not to look at the picture on the dashboard and all the baggage it carried. Not a single one of the instruments displayed gave any data, as though silently mourning with her.

Wait.

She glanced at one of the readings again. "The Marker signal," she realized aloud. "It's gone too!" It truly was - there were no waves coming across the scanner, nothing to show. Nothing but dead silence, something she was actually grateful for.

A smile broke across her face. "You did it, Isaac! You really did it."

He had saved numerous lives by destroying the Moon. He had been a hero, yet again, but lost his life in the process.

The smile faded at the thought, and she looked away, into the cold void of space, sitting back in her chair.

She had to get home.

The computerized voice chirped away as she confirmed the coordinates to Earth, and choking back a sob, she waited for the ship to take her there. Warning Earth was her priority now. Isaac wasn't with her to do it, like he had been for the majority of their time together, but she would do it. For him.

Even if she could start over and find a new life somehow, she would never forget what had transpired on Tau Volantis. The price had been too high, but then again, what were two people compared with the entire human race?

_The world is ending, and all you can think about is us?_

He had been right to think that. The world didn't give a shit and never had, while he had been her life.

And now he was gone.

She bitterly regretted every vicious fight they had ever had. The end didn't justify the means at all - it wasn't even worth the smallest bit. If only she could tell the future, this whole thing could have been avoided.

But of course, it's impossible to reverse the apocalypse.

**Yay, first chapter! I'm glad to get back to this. It actually... feels good. Almost like I was missing something.**

**I sincerely hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading.**


	2. Chapter 2: Hope

**Hello again! I hope the last weeks have been good to all of you since the last update.**

**For those of you just jumping on the bandwagon, this story used to be called Unfinished Business. It used to have 18 chapters, and was my idea of what Dead Space 4 would be like and how they would finally end the Necromorph invasion. However, I realized that not only did I fuck up the characters' personalities, I focused too much on the relationship between Isaac and Ellie rather than an actual compelling plot. Admittedly, the plot wasn't my main concern initially, but let's see if I can write a good plot while capturing both the characters properly and writing the proper amount of romance, not choking everyone with fluff.**

**Thanks for the 150-plus hits, guys. I really appreciate it! And I hope you are all enjoying the story thus far.**

**Onward!**

Ellie shivered as the memory finally left her head. It was as if her body and brain would never forgive her for what had transpired at Tau Volantis. Those images would be burned in her mind forever.

_Not now, _she thought, forcing the recollection out of mind with a grimace. _I have to focus._

She had to keep working. For Isaac. She would stop it all, this time, for sure. It was her duty to him.

After arriving on Earth, she had immediately informed Earth Space of the possible threat. She didn't know how they let her get away without questioning her. Perhaps it had been the absolute look of desperation on her face, or the blood and burns still stinging her skin. At any rate, they had immediately issued a global warning after hearing a winded explanation from her, and now there was nothing to do but wait to see what would happen. The whole world was holding its breath, it seemed.

For Ellie, however, she had to get together another group. Initially she thought it was finally over after destroying one Moon, but a newscast on the holographic TV had shown her how very wrong she was. There were still outbreaks happening everywhere, thankfully except for Earth as of yet. Although it was only a matter of time... She couldn't shake the feeling that it was only the beginning.

She needed experienced people whom she could trust to have her back, and research everything they could to end the Necromorph invasions on other colonies and hopefully for good. It was hard work, not rewarding in the least, but she had managed to snag a couple of leads and possible contacts.

Going back to living on Earth had been a simple and quiet business. As soon as she had landed in Torino, one of the last intact cities in the Pan European sector, she'd ditched the ship, rented a cheap apartment with the near-nonexistent amount of credits she'd scrounged up, and gotten a job to pay for the minimal expenses. In her free time she searched for people who might be able to help, looking for hours each evening at those who just might be interested in saving humanity.

She couldn't go to EarthGov, as they were only interested in harnessing the Markers' power, and wouldn't want to destroy them forever, no matter how much damage their research over the years had caused to the human population. Finding the last remnants of their forces would be hard enough, and she would likely waste time searching for them only to be turned down. Unitologists were out of the question, as they worshiped the sick ideology... Her only option was to hunt down people who had been partial to neither group, but were also educated about the Markers and knew exactly what they did and perhaps how to stop them.

She needed to find members of resistance groups. It was a pity they couldn't just advertise themselves in a war like this, however convenient that might have been for her. They were already risking their necks by forming their own side, and of course wouldn't have time to document the actions of a covert military group. Life was hard enough already, and Unitology threatened to cast its dark shadow over everything.

Perhaps scientists who had formerly worked aboard planetcrackers would do the job. They would have some knowledge after all, and might be willing to help considering all that had transpired aboard them.

Ellie frowned, tapping her fingers idly.

That is, if they hadn't all been killed first.

She hesitated, long fingers paused over the keyboard. Well, she had to start somewhere...

She hit _enter _after typing in _USG Ishimura crew members._ There was a chance that some of them could have escaped the doomed ship before it all went to hell. Most of the escape pods had been intact, from what Isaac had told her.

Ellie's eyes flicked to his picture, taped carefully to the wall above her computer. She sighed and leaned back, blinking her eyes heavily and stretching.

Her body was so very tired and beaten down, but she couldn't rest. Innocent people were dying far away in other colonies, simply for living in the wrong place, and she knew Isaac would want to save them. He had always been that way, and of course some of his ideas had rubbed off on her.

"Always the goddamn hero," Ellie murmured quietly.

The page was taking a while to load, with her apartment's shitty connection, so she stood up and poured herself a cup of coffee as milky streaks of light just peeked through the dirty windows.

She stared out of her run-of-the-mill apartment's kitchen window, clutching her mug of barely palatable coffee as she contemplated the future. An invasion was bound to happen soon, there was no doubt about that. And her current residence was so crowded that a single Necromorph could do irreparable damage and turn everyone into fodder within a matter of hours.

She needed more time, but of course the going was slow. At times like these it was all she could do to toil on and pray for the best.

Her RIG beeped with another call, almost startling her in the dim silence of her tiny home. Wordlessly, she glanced at the notification on her wrist monitor, then ended the call without listening to it, hoping against hope that this would be the last. Ever since returning from Tau Volantis, she had received dozens upon dozens of audiolinks from sources that always said _Unknown_ or _No RIG ID._ It could have been from anyone, EarthGov, Unitologists, her relatives, as unlikely as that last possibility was. But it was probably the former, people who wanted Isaac's location, and Ellie simply deleted all of them so they wouldn't get anything about him from her.

It wasn't like she could tell them much, anyways. There was no mention of him, or Carver, or even the huge Tau Volantis incident on the news, and nothing had been reported for the three weeks Ellie had been on Earth.

It was strange to her that others could be ignorant of the missing people who had destroyed a Moon. How could something that important just go unnoticed? But then again, people lost loved ones - who meant the world to them - every single day, and most others didn't have any idea of their pain. She had firsthand experience of life continuing as usual, when to her it seemed that it should be dark and gray.

Ellie took a sip, just pushing down a grimace when her RIG dinged with the unfamiliar sound of someone leaving a message. She checked her monitor, eyes widening in surprise.

The caller was still _U__nknown,_ but she hesitantly pressed the Play button.

The transmission was filled with static. It was hard to tell what the other person was even saying, but she could make out the sounds of heavy breathing, almost gasping, really.

That was the only noise for a few moments. And then -

"Ellie?"

Her eyes widened and her throat froze, a lump building almost instantaneously. As the oh-so-familiar voice breathed, "Ellie..." and the transmission cut off, tears threatened to spill down her cheeks and she mouthed "Isaac."

Her fingers loosened around the cup she held. The resounding crash and tinkling of porcelain she ignored.

He was really alive?

All the dreams Ellie had been entertaining, the idle thoughts, hopes, wishes - were all of them about to come true? She had fervently prayed for his return as many times as possible, but never before had she really believed it was really going to happen.

If only she had answered the audiolink. She might have been able to communicate with him, to hear his voice and hold a live conversation after the three weeks of deafeningly painful silence. She had called him and vice versa so many times during their time together; how could her RIG not recognize his ID?

But how long had he been up there?

It was very possible that he had tried to send that immediately after the Moon crashed. If so, he had been there for three weeks, which was certainly a very long time for someone to be alive with no sustenance, no life support. There was always the possibility he was injured as well.

Ellie stepped over the mess at her feet and headed straight for her chair, slumping into it and massaging her temples.

What if the audiolink hadn't been able to send for a while until he had somehow come into range? Had somebody been blocking their transmissions?

Was he even still alive?

She couldn't afford to get her hopes up only to crush them into dust. If Isaac really wasn't alive, and that transmission had taken a long time in coming, she wasn't sure that she could withstand the heartbreak and utter disappointment.

But if there was even the slightest chance that he was alive, she had to try. He was her mission now. Once he had sacrificed for her, coming back out of the woodwork to save her life. It was her turn to do so as well.

She woke her computer up - how long had she been standing there? - and clicked on the first database she found, determination flooding her. The small seed of hope quietly blooming inside her she clutched to her heart.

**So, I'm sure it was obvious that I jumped to after Awakened. The first chapter was just an introduction as well as a warm up, and this is actually somewhat progressing through the planned storyline. This chapter was also fairly short - sorry about that, but I'm trying not to rush the story and let it grow properly.**

**Thanks for reading! Feel free to PM me with any questions.**


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